Recently we linked to a list of people that the British paper The Guardian deemed culpable for the current financial crisis which began, you'll remember, with the imminent collapse of government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) like lending institutions Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Prominent on that list were Alan Greenspan and George Bush and absent, oddly, were any congressional Democrats.
This video of a Fox News report, however shows that Greenspan and the Bush administration in its first term sought greater oversight and more effective regulation of the GSEs but were resisted by congressional Democrats, particularly Barney Frank and Chuck Schumer. It explains the time-line which reveals that, contrary to the claims of Democrats that the failure of the GSEs was due to GOP unwillingness to regulate them, it was, in fact, the result of the failure of congressional Democrats to support Bush administration proposals to strengthen oversight.
The Democrats didn't want to rein in Fannie and Freddie and tighten their lending practices because they thought that doing so would make it more difficult for low income people to get home mortgages. A Senator at the time, Barack Obama and the black congressional caucus pushed the GSEs to keep their lending practices lenient so that people who were bad risks could still buy houses. Obama, after less than two years in the Senate, was rewared for his efforts by becoming the second highest recipient of cash contributions from Fannie and Freddie - which bespeaks their gratitude to him for helping to keep them unregulated:
After this display of wretched misjudgment on the part of people charged with congressional oversight of the GSEs how can they still be serving in Washington today? Why isn't this dereliction publicized more vigorously? You can be assured that had the fault lain with Republicans we'd be hearing about it every night until the villains were all either in jail or hounded from office. The major media has rightly been vocal in their outrage of corporate golden parachutes awarded to CEOs whose judgment was so bad that the companies they ran crashed and burned. Yet politicians are also being rewarded for abject incompetence. They get elected and re-elected to high office, and the liberal media helps them do it by keeping the people in the dark about the role these people played in bringing us to the brink of financial ruin. The MSM helps put into office to solve the crisis the very people who caused it. What a country.
RLC